Three European titles in three years with three clubs

Imag­ine the scene. You are sit­ting in a pub with your friends, tak­ing part in the weekly quiz. Your team is one right an­swer away from vic­tory. The quiz an­nouncer clears his throat and reads out the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “Which fe­male bas­ket­ball player is the only one to ever win three suc­ces­sive Eu­roLeague Women's ti­tles with three dif­fer­ent clubs?”

Keen fans of women's bas­ket­ball apart, most peo­ple would draw a blank and throw up their hands. The an­swer, just in case you ever need it, is Sil­via Domínguez, the Mont­gat-born guard who is cur­rently with the Spain na­tional team com­pet­ing in the 2014 FIBA World Cham­pi­onship for Women in Ankara, Turkey.

In fact, Domínguez – known for her solid, ef­fi­cient but un­com­pli­cated play­ing style – has been a main­stay of the na­tional team since 2006, when she was called up at the age of 19 to take part in the World Cham­pi­onship in Brazil. Since then, Sil­via has played nu­mer­ous in­ter­na­tional matches and was an in­te­gral part of the squad that was pro­claimed Eu­ro­pean cham­pi­ons in June 2013 after beat­ing France in the final.

How­ever, Domínguez's his­toric achieve­ment came in club bas­ket­ball, first in Spain and now in Rus­sia. It was after mov­ing to Sala­manca's Per­fumerías Avenida in the 2006/07 sea­son that Sil­via began to es­tab­lish her­self, even­tu­ally be­com­ing team cap­tain. In 2011, in her final sea­son at the club, she won her first Eu­roLeague title, a feat she re­peated the fol­low­ing year with her new club, Ros Casares of Va­len­cia. Then a year later, Domínguez helped yet an­other new club, Rus­sia's UMMC Eka­ter­in­burg, to the 2013 Eu­ro­pean title: three clubs, three sea­sons, three ti­tles.

With the new bas­ket­ball sea­son soon to begin, Sil­via will be hop­ing to enjoy yet more suc­cess with her new club, which swept the board last term, win­ning not only the Eu­roLeague in 2013, but also the do­mes­tic Russ­ian Pre­mier League and the Russ­ian Cup. UMMC Eka­ter­in­burg be­gins its 2014/15 Eu­roLeague cam­paign with a fix­ture against ZVVZ USK Praha on No­vem­ber 5 in Prague.